[Illustration: W. B. Scott. Painter Illman Brothers Engravers & Printers] PROGRESS OF THOUGHT. ENGRAVED EXPRESSLY FOR ERROR’S CHAINS.] ERROR’S CHAINS: HOW FORGED AND BROKEN. A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL, SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS ERRORS THAT MANKIND HAS FALLEN INTO AND PRACTISED FROM THE CREATION DOWN TO THE PRESENT TIME. BY FRANK S. DOBBINS, LATE RESIDENT OF YOKOHAMA, JAPAN, ASSISTED BY HON. S. WELLS WILLIAMS, LL.D., AND PROF. ISAAC HALL, LL.B., Ph.D. _The former forty years resident in China, late Prof. of Chinese Language and Literature in Yale College, Conn., Author of “The Middle Kingdom” the Standard Lexico of China, etc., etc., President of the American Bible Society, etc.; the latter an eminent Orientalist and late Professor of the College of Beirut, Syria, now Associate of the American Oriental Society and the London Society of Biblical Archæologyy Associate Editor of the “Sunday-School Times,” etc._ MAGNIFICENTLY ILLUSTRATED. THIRTY-NINTH EDITION. WILLEY BROTHERS & CO., NEW YORK. 1886. Copyright, FRANK S. DOBBINS, 1883. PREFACE. The story of the world’s worship is a story of absorbing interest. The odd and the curious, the enchanting and the revolting are each factors of heathen devotion. We well remember with what exhaustless interest we looked in childhood at strange pictures of idols and temples, and listened to the reading of tales about the heathen. When the celebrated Dr. Alexander Duff was a little boy, his father was accustomed on Sabbath afternoons to show him pictures of idols, and to explain their histories. So vividly did the pictures and their stories impress the boy, that when he became a man he left Scotland and went to labor for the heathen of India. The subject is indeed intensely interesting. Every nation has its God, or gods, and its corresponding forms of worship. Nothing lies so close to the heart of mankind as its religious faith. Religion in some form is interwoven with the entire fabric of human history. It concerns man’s dearest pleasures, his fondest hopes, and his highest aspirations. Man must worship. It is part of his nature to worship. Hence, from the most civilized European to the half-civilized Chinaman, and even down to the degraded Hottentot; in all stages of man’s existence, among all races and classes, some form of worship is found. Nothing surely can interest us more than the story of that faith in which our fellow-creatures have lived and died.